Ron Paul: When The People Change, Washington Will Change (Full Speech at Arizona State University)

Rush Transcript

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Barry Goldwater Jr.: He truly believes in what he speaks, whether it’s about the gold standard, or the evils of the Federal Reserve, or the continuing intrusion of government in our private lives. He truly is a great spokesman. We are fortunate to have with us today on campus, our interpreter for liberty and freedom. Please welcome Ron Paul.

Ron Paul: Thank you. I don’t know if anybody is here that was here last year about this time I’m on time this year. I was a little bit late last time, but I’m delighted to see so many. I was surprised to see so many last year, having come about an hour and a half late. Planes were running on time, and I got through TSA without hitting anybody, even though I felt like it. No, it is great to be here and I am always pleased to go to the campuses because if there is ever a place that needs to realize what’s happening and organize and continue the revolution, it’s on the college campuses.

And as you all know, there was an election recently and it looks like we may be getting some help in Washington and there will be a few new people coming from Arizona and I am hopeful that will be beneficial. Now, if you’re True-Blue Republican, you might think that everything has being accomplished, everything has been accomplished and all will be well. I happen to not be quite that optimistic. I think maybe things will slow up, but we still have a long way to go. And the Republican Party doesn’t have all that great a reputation for solving problems. You know, I was energized and thought that in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won, things would change, but not much happened. The spending continued, the deficits continued. In 1994 the Republicans took over the House, and I thought, “Wow, maybe they’re serious this time”, and that was one of the reasons I ran in 1996 thinking that the country was changing and the Republican Party would do better. Then in the year 2000 the Republicans got control of the House and the Senate and the presidency; something they hadn’t had for years, and I thought, “Wow, maybe this is the time that some good will come”. But I think if you’re realistic and just look back at those 8 years, they probably didn’t do that well. So Republicans are going to have to prove themselves. But the sentiment is different, because the pressure isn’t coming from the top part of the Republican Party, it’s coming from the grassroots, from the Campaign for Liberty people and the Tea Party people; that’s where the pressure’s coming from.

So we can be pleased with some of the changes. I don’t believe government’s going to change until the people change. And governments generally reflect the values of the people, and the example of auditing the Fed, I think, tells us that when the people wake up and they demand something, they can get both Democrats and Republicans to respond. So I was very pleased with what happened there, although we didn’t have a total victory there; we had 320 co-sponsors in the House. That means a lot of Democrats sponsored the position and all the Republicans did, too. But it didn’t come because I had a great deal of influence in Washington, it’s because there were enough people like you who called your congressman and said, “Look, we want to know what the Fed’s doing to us, we want to know where they’re spending the money and who they’re bailing out”. And because of that, the Congress came around to accepting that. So the grassroots efforts and the beliefs of the people make a difference. When that doesn’t work anymore, and I know there are days you have to be very frustrated with the Congress, because it sounds like they aren’t listening at all. But if people are loud enough about it, they will. Just think of the improvement, we had something happen in Houston just this last week. Guess what? They turned off all the highways cameras, all the traffic cameras in Houston. And that came about by a referendum. So although there’s room to have a lot of complains with the Congress and the president and everything else, there’s still lot of pressure on the people. So if the people are complacent, if they’re fat and lazy and think the government is going to take care of them from cradle to grave, they’re going to do it until the government and the country goes bankrupt; and we’re there. And that is why we are going to have a much greater opportunity for others to look at our views, because you just can’t continue to spend into prosperity, it doesn’t work. There are people today that are looking at our history of 1930s – I cannot believe this because it’s such an immoral thought, it’s such a horrible idea, it’s so unconstitutional, and it’s stinking economics. They said, “You know, all we need is a war to get us out of our recession”. That’s obscene. But there are people who think that way, and wars are perpetual and they’re not partisan, they are bipartisan and that is the real tragedy. Monetary policy doesn’t change, foreign policy doesn’t change, welfare policy doesn’t change. Names change, but the attitudes stay the same. It will remain that way until the attitudes of the people change. When the attitudes of the people change, Washington will change. I believe we’re in a transition. Somebody in Arizona a few years ago coined the word, “The Revolution” and spelt it in a special way. It originated here, it is a national organization now. The revolution is alive and well, and let’s continue it.

This last week I got rather upset, as many other Americans have, dealing with travelling at the airports and with the TSA. Now, I know there are other problems and the other day when I gave my little talk on the House floor when I introduced legislation to deal with this, for years, decades literally, I’ve been complaining about our foreign policy, the stupidity of our foreign policy and how it causes blowback. The stupidity and the weird ideas that governments can secretly print as much money as they want, and it’s good economic policy. And we can spend at will and run up deficits at will and tax at will. I’ve complained about that for a long, long time, and they are very, very serious problems, and they have brought us to this crisis. But, believe me, what’s going on at the airports and what has happened just recently with these new rules, if we, as American citizens, put up with this, let me tell you, there’s not much hope for us. We need to stop this tyranny at the airports.

I have a little bill that I have introduced – and I am famous for not writing complicated bills, this one was about one paragraph. And what it does is it addresses the subject of sovereign immunity, which is a principle that’s been around a while and it’s out of control in Washington, but in particular with the airports. Now what would happen if everybody in this crowd would do what a TSA agent does? Out in the open go up and grope people and take nude pictures of people. I mean, what is going on here? You’d be arrested, you’d put in jail and all kinds of things. But are we going to remain complacent and say, “Oh, it’s the government, they’re allowed to do it and they’re making us safe, and therefore we have to accept it”. They tell us when we go to the airport that you have to submit because you bought a ticket. And when you buy a ticket, you’ve given up your rights. People on national television say that they believe it. Whoever heard of giving up your rights because you’ve bought an airplane ticket? I mean, it makes no sense whatsoever.

But I got to thinking, you know, if we remove the immunity, this would solve the problem at the airport, because you can’t sue anybody. We have two rules: government agents can do one thing, you and I can do other things. But one rule in a free society is that it isn’t a free society anymore if you have different rules. If government agents can do something and they have certain rules, and the people have different rules, believe me, freedom is at risk. And it isn’t only at the airports where the individuals are immune from perpetuating crime. But what about the idea of theft? Does government steal? Of course they steal. You know, if you aren’t fortunate enough to have an automobile, everybody knows you can’t go and steal an automobile from your neighbor because he has two automobiles. Fortunately, we still see that as theft. But they do not see it as theft if you send a congressman to steal the automobile and then he gets political points for it. When it’s theft by the individual, it should be theft by the government and they shouldn’t have immunity.

Now what kind of trouble do you get into if you’re a counterfeiter? You know that’s a serious crime. They recognized in the very early part of our history – the Monetary Control Act of the 1790, too. The Currency Control Act Bill then, they passed that and they said, “No counterfeiting”, and if you did counterfeit, they gave the death penalty for counterfeiting. But here today what do we do? You go to jail if you counterfeited a federal document or a currency, which is fine and dandy. That’s obviously fraud. But why are we so complacent to turn the counterfeit machine over to a few individuals, usually one, who gets to counterfeit the currency of the world (the dollar) in secrecy, and they spend it without any supervision. They ought to lose their sovereign immunity as well.

What about those individuals in both parties for good many decades now who totally ignored the constitution and take us to war illegally, without declaration of war? Why are they allowed to do this? Why do we have a CIA that gets involved in overthrowing of governments, rigging elections around the world? Then we sit back and we wonder, “Why do they hate us”. Because we’re involved and we’re bombing and we’re killing people. You know, one of the big issues going on today is the issue of torture. We now have become a nation known for torturing. Pictures have been out there. Early on when the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo pictures came out, we don’t see them anymore, nobody talks about them. Torture still goes on, we farm it out to other countries. But those pictures circulated around the Muslim world, and believe me, they didn’t like it. What would we think if somebody was torturing American people around the world? I mean, it would infuriate us. So what do we do? We have the information and came up and they suggested maybe ought to look into it. And this administration was supposed to do that. So they started investigating, they had some evidence that the CIA was involved. And guess what? The CIA destroyed all the evidence, and this administration will not pursue it. They excused themselves and said, “That’s it, we can’t find any evidence, there will be no prosecution”. Not one single prosecution, not one challenge to people who claim that, “Oh no, they’re not really torturing”. But it was a policy. As long as torture is policy of America, America cannot remain great.

As you know, just this last week we had this revelation in a court with Ahmed Ghailani. He was indicted, he was in Guantanamo and Obama said, “I’m up to New York.” And people who didn’t want that to be done were very worried about this. “Oh, they’ll be riots in the streets and chaos and all that”. Nobody even knew the trial was going on. The problem didn’t come until after the trial. He was charged with 285 counts and he was convicted on one. So those who don’t believe in open trials and the rule of law were screaming, they’re going nuts. How horrible. But what was the punishment for this one conviction that he had? He got a life sentence. But they said, “No, it wasn’t good enough. We don’t want this, we can’t have these civilian trials. We have to have secret military trials”. But the important thing is, do we want to set a precedent like that? That is what is wrong, we can’t. We have to have to live under the law so we can’t have these courts acting outside the law. And this is what is happening today and I just am very disturbed that so many people can support issues like that and we now have a policy. Frankly it’s been around for a while, but frankly admitted in our committees today there is a clear cut policy that the American president and the attorney general can designate American citizens to be assassinated. Now these guys will probably say, “There are 3 or 4 Americans on there. Nobody here is going to be on that list, at least for a year or two.” But just the idea that they can do it – they say, “But this is a bad guy”. Yea, he probably is a bad guy, but the law is supposed to protect the bad guy so the good guys are never treated like a bad guy.

But what they want to protect are secret prisons and the secret judicial system at the military courts, and they don’t want to lose their ability to torture. Now the reason the individual wasn’t convicted on more crimes this week was because all the information came from torturing the guy. And he was probably very much involved, but he wasn’t directly involved, he was indirectly involved. But they said, “You can’t do this in a civilian court, we have to keep it secret, it has to be military, because they’re all guilty”. Guess what? Since 9/11 we have had 400+ individuals who have been tried and convicted in civilian courts, and there have been 4 convicted in military courts. And the clamor now is, “No, we can’t depend on civilian courts, we have to have military courts”. Very, very bad precedent and we must be aware of this so that we can hopefully get this stopped. You know, talking about giving sovereign immunity to our government officials, and I would remove it all, but what about giving immunity to the whistle blowers? They’re the ones who need the immunity. We have a few brave souls, especially in the foreign policy area. It came up in Vietnam, and it’s come up more recently with WikiLeaks. Technically yes, they’re breaking a rule, but what is government doing? They’re breaking the law, and they’re doing these horrible things. So if we have an American citizen that is willing to take the consequences and practice civil disobedience and say, “This is what our government’s being doing”, should he be locked up in prison? Or should we see him as a political hero? Maybe he is a true patriot who reveals what’s going on in government.

One of the things I think that motivated me and so many to do what they have been doing at airports is we’ve come to believe, whether it’s in the economic sense or the physical sense, that the purpose of government is to make us safe. And I know President Bush said this frequently and evidently our current president believes the same thing: “That the purpose of the government, my responsibly, is to make you safe”. It isn’t. He doesn’t take an oath of office: “I promise to do anything conceivable, even disrespect the constitution, to make sure you’re safe”. It’s not in there, that’s not it. You take an oath to obey the law and enforce the law, and that law is the constitution. You take an oath to obey the constitution.

But this idea that government can make us safe causes moral hazard. Too many people believe it, too many people for too many decades, for the last 70 or 80 years, have believed the lies of the government. They said, “We will take care of you. We can take care of you through a welfare state from cradle to grave”. We can spend money, borrow money, print money, and if people dare touch us, we’ll go to war against them and everybody is going to live happily ever after, because we are the kingpins. We have all the wealth and we have the armies, and everybody’s dependent us because we have the reserve currency of the world”. But, you know, time is running out on that, and people are starting to realize that government has failed. This is what the real message is in the last 2 to 3 years. The absolute awareness that government’s incapable of taking care of you. And if they try to, the only thing they can do, they will fail at their effort, but they will take away your liberties.

So what they do to us at the airports, that doesn’t make us any safer. Do we need the TSA to be safe? No. You know, government, once again, the moral hazard of depending on the government … before 9/11, who was in charge of security of airplanes? It was our government. Our government said, “We’re going to make you safe”, so they had the checkpoints and the x-rays. But they had rules; don’t ever resist a hijacker, and no guns on the airplane. Now if I’d be running an airplane in a free society and I thought my job is to protect my customers, I would probably hire and expert from Brinks and ask them how they keep their money safe. It’s usually with a gun and an armored car. So what do we need? We needed tight doors on the airplanes and we needed a gun. As far as I’m concerned, I think that the planners of terrorism against us have all forgotten about the airplane. They’re laughing at us for doing the silly things over and over again. We’re not any safer and we’re doing to ourselves much more harm than the Al-Qaida is doing to us. We’re our own worst enemies. The Al-Qaida do want to come here, they have their reasons for wanting to come here. But if they come here and commit and act, that is horrible. But the Al-Qaida cannot invade us and change our constitution, change our laws. So we are obligated to obey and defend the constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. And right now, I am convinced our domestic concerns are much greater than our foreing concerns. We are not going to be invaded, but we are going to have our liberties continuously eroded unless we get a new generation of young people to grow up and say, “Listen, enough is enough. We want our freedoms back, we want to take care of ourselves and get the government off our backs and out of our wallets”. The TSA will claim, “Well, we’ve accomplished a lot, we haven’t had an attack”. And that’s true, but I think it’s basically because they did two things that should have been done even before 9/11. But we’re not safer overall, because we haven’t really changed anything. There’s been so much achieved against us. So since 9/11 we’ve eroded our civil liberties, we went over there to teach them a lesson with the loss of 6,000 American military people, 75,000 people who have been severely injured, and 10s of thousands who have come back with post-traumatic stress syndrome, and that is what it’s costing us. I mean, we are losing, where is the punishment? We’re punishing the American people. But you know, if we really want to punish and get rid of Al-Qaida, we should think about how you get rid of the drug dealers. You get rid of the drug dealers by legalizing the drugs, then the drug dealers are gone. But if you want to get rid of Al-Qaida, guess what it takes? You have to change the foreign policy and nobody wants to do that. We’re going to run out of money and then maybe we have to, but hopefully your generation will say, “We’ll change the foreign policy right now”. Just think of what the effort to recruit individuals so angry at us to commit suicide terrorism against us. If we weren’t over there in their countries. We’re in all these countries and how many people are talking about the loss of American lives. How many foreigners have been killed? You know, just the other day, again, one of our cruise missiles or drone missiles went into Pakistan. I mean, we’re at war with Pakistan. They killed 30 people and say, “Well that’s collateral damage.” But you know what? Every bit of collateral damage invites another family to hate us.

One of the greatest or the worst, I guess worst achievements of the previous administration was to convince the American people that they come here to kill us because we’re free and prosperous. That is total nonsense. If you continue to believe that, we can’t solve our problems. The people – and they’ve been a few who have done serious studies about who and why and what motivates a suicide terrorists – and the number 1 cause is not religion, the number 1 cause is occupation of a foreign country. And that is why we ought to give up occupying foreign countries. It’s not part of our constitution and we ought to bring the troops home before the country is totally bankrupt and the dollar is destroyed. Allow these funds to be spent here at home. But to spend them overseas and continue this process, it is not going to do anything but build more enemies. So as we work hard, we create more and more enemies. And there’s no reason to suspect that we are much safer as long as they’re going to be more enemies developing around the world. So change in foreign policy doesn’t seem to be that difficult for me. You know, I’ve been asked this question before: “Well, what would you do if you had a thing to say about these troops overseas? How would you get out? Wouldn’t it cause chaos?” No, the chaos is because we’re over there. We just marched in these countries, lets just march out.

This consequence of undermining our civil liberties is really disturbing. That should be what gets to us because it seems like we can put the wars out of way unless you have a (?) sent over there and put things off and try not to worry too much about the monetary system and the Federal Reserve and all these things. But back to this intrusion at the airports, up until now it’s been traditional to understand that a totalitarian society is known when they force you to carry your papers. But we’ve been there for a while. Where can you go without your Social Security number? Where can you go without your driver’s license? Can you get a job, can you open up a bank account, can you get on an airplane? No, you have to show your papers. But this is worse. I don’t know of any country that’s ever done it; in this case, what we have to do is reveal our genitalia to make movement around the country or around the world. If we don’t get to the point where we just say, “This is it, we’re going to put our foot down and not do it”. But people say, “Why do this, why boycott and do this, you’ll be late on your airplane”, and there is a lot of truth in that. But people will finally boycott or obstruct or practice civil disobedience when it gets so bad. It’s incrementalism that is so dangerous and fear is their tool. How many times have they made it worse at the airport without having some incident? “Oh, the shoe bomber almost blew us up”, as if if we didn’t have the TSA that wouldn’t have happened. But if you would have had private options, maybe it would have happened. Before 9/11 we were spending 40 billion dollars on intelligence gathering and they had a lot of information gathered to indicate that there was enough information to get fair warning. I mean, what’s the CIA supposed to do? They’re supposed to give us intelligence and maybe protect us. But they ignored that, and they go off and fix elections and get involved in starting new wars. So this, to me, is something that we all should be able to rally around and say that we will not put up with it any longer. And when we do run into obstacles then we have to realize why that is happening. And the airports may become chaotic and it will make a lot of people unhappy. But if we say nothing, can we depend on the courts to protect us, no way. Can we depend on the executive branch? No way. If the Congress is waking up, hopefully it’s waking up, the Congress will do something about it. One suggestion is this: the chairman of the committee that handles TSA has suggested that why don’t we turn the management of the screeners over to private industry? But he didn’t say, “Change the rules”. Private industry would enforce them, that’s just another contractor, like sending contractors over to Afghanistan. They would be required to enforce the same laws. But they can’t become efficient in abusing us. So that isn’t the answer. The answer is, that your security and your safety depends on what you do. We can’t depend on the police, we don’t have a policeman at the front door of our house. I think the founders understood this, that’s why they gave us the second amendment. But if the police can’t protect us, then we can’t depend on our government to do it. I mean, if we’re responsible then it’s up to us. So we have really an opportunity, although this is bad economics, I can go on and on about how horrible the deficit is, how bad the monetary system is and what we’re expecting to get with a monetary crisis. But the big crisis is the crisis on the attack on our liberty. For all the things that I do and for reasons, I’m not involved in the Federal Reserve because I care only about the monetary issue. There are a lot of reasons for me being against the Fed, you know, like the constitution, like economic policy and secrecy and all these things. But the real reason to be opposed to the authorities who can create money to subsidize and take care of debt is the fact that that’s how government gets bigger. If government never had an instrument of inflation with a secret bank, it would be very hard to have runaway welfare spending because they’d have to borrow the money in the market, interest rates would go up high, and it would be cut off. So if you say, “This is crazy to attack the Federal Reserve and why do you do it?” If you care about personal liberty, if you care about a more peaceful world, if you care about a healthier economy, you have to support the position of getting rid of the Federal Reserve. Because the Federal Reserve is the engine of inflation and they can’t do much without this assistance. End The Fed, yes.

In a free society, it doesn’t bite to have a bit of tolerance. In a free society where you have responsibly for your life, and you should, it’s a natural right for you to have your inalienable rights. You should have the right to all that you produce, which means no income tax. But you also have the obligation that if you don’t do well, if you live with risky behavior, then you have to suffer the consequence and there is one strong rule in a society like that: you can’t do to your neighbor what the government’s being doing to our neighbors lately. You have to respect your neighbor in both, person and property. So this is a society that emphasizes personal liberty. And it was pretty well understood in the early part of our history, but about a 100 years ago, for some reason, people came along and they lost their way because we became so wealthy. They weren’t concerned so much about the principles of liberty, they were concerned about the products of liberty. They became materialistic. And for another reason, those who did defend liberty, did it in bits and pieces. Somebody would speak up and say, “Oh yea, I think economic liberty is good, we should have free markets and no price controls and wage controls”, and somebody else would say, “Oh yea, I think we should have personal choices”. But freedom is all one thing. The reason it doesn’t work is there is too much intolerance in the world. Now, in a free society people are going to do dumb things and they’re going to write bad things. That doesn’t mean you have to endorse what they do, but I means you can’t tell them what they have to do, as long as they don’t hurt other people. But we get intolerant and there are some do-gooders in Washington that they believe, and they told me personally … I asked them, “Why are you passing this piece of legislation telling individuals on some consumer protecting thing?” They literally said, “Well, the people are too stupid. We have to do it, we have to take care of them”. They believe that. But there are others that think that if you had the right to put anything into your body or into your lungs, then you will immediately become a heroin addict. And, you know, there is no trust in … I think the best way to think about this is there’s still a relative understanding of the first amendment, even though that is being eroded lately. But there’s a relative understanding that the first amendment allows people to say unpopular things. They can preach unpopular doctrines, they can talk about socialism and everything else in a free society. But when it comes to personal behavior, nobody wants to apply those same rules to be tolerant. To be tolerant of people making choices is different than tolerating and endorsing what they do. They say, “Well, the world’s all messed up, we don’t want people doing these bad things”. Well, fine. You have a lot of responsibly. Just think if everybody took responsibly for themselves and did the right thing, the world would be a better place. But then you might have responsibility of parents and family and friends and neighbors and churches to improve society. But once you turn it over to the government, believe me, it is bad news for us, it’s an undermining of liberty. Everything they want to make it a fair economic society, they have to do it with the use of violence. Some people who are strongly antiwar love the welfare state, and they don’t see that they’re using the same violence. Violence of the war is the violence of the welfare state, because they’re taking by force from people things that are rightfully somebody else’s and giving them to somebody else. Now, the one argument that some make on this is a legitimate argument, because free markets and capitalism today are not well understood. We don’t have free market capitalism. We have too many corporations and banks who benefit through the military-industrial complex and the bailouts and the monetary system. So we don’t want to be trapped into defending them. What we want to defend is freedom of choice and we don’t have to be against wealth. Wealth creation in a free society is done by allowing the consumer to vote. The vote in a free society is done everything a consumer buys something. If you don’t like the product, you just boycott it and you don’t buy it.

I often wonder about if we ever applied the principle of cell phones. Cell phones fascinate me because in spite of the horrors of big government, cell phones are rather prevalent, have you noticed? Sometimes people buy one every year, sometimes they have two or three. Technology is always changing. Can you imagine if the department of Homeland Security twenty years ago was given the assignment to make sure everybody in America has a good cell phone? I mean, what would have happened? They would have had one company make it and it probably would have been junk, and it just wouldn’t have worked. But today it’s spread around. The cell phone philosophy is a philosophy and guess what? We ought to use that for the distribution of services like medical care. Free competition in medical services would be great. There wouldn’t be the licensing that causes monopolies, we wouldn’t have the government subsidizing insurance companies. With all this fanfare with Obama care, guess who came out alright, drug companies and insurance companies came out alright. So the corporations still came out regardless of which administration. But in a free society you have to provide services, you’re not handicapped by licensing and restrictions. Today, everything is licensed and restricted and planned by the federal government. But guess where you might do something on your own to take care of yourself, and you’re not allowed, you’re prohibited. Frequently, holistic and voluntary natural health cures … the government always wants to put a drug box in your way. They want to regulate the vitamins companies, the nutrition companies. Not only do they want to do it at the national level, they want to do it at the international level. Once again, freedom of choice is the answer. You know, if we can understand that freedom of choice intellectually, which you read, which if we recognize it in our church and in our faith and in our beliefs and that’s supposed to be related to our eternity and our faith and our believes. If we can’t allow people to make those decisions, why in the world can’t we say, “People can make up their own mind about what they want to do with their body, whether it’s medical or whatever”?

Now why should we continue the struggle for liberty? I’m not optimistic about in a year or two things are going to work out where everything is going to be just fixed up again. But I think things will get a lot worse, I think there will be a collapse of the currency, and we should be prepared. And the strongest preparation is to understand what kind of government we want, the nature of government. We have to know what kind of government we want, what should the role of government be? Should the role of government be what it’s been for a 100 years? I would say no, it’s totally failed. The founders had a good lean on this, the role of government ought to be to protect our liberties; that’s the purpose. But in order to do that, and the time will come when we’ll have more opportunity, we have to shrug off the shackles of big government. We have to just get rid of them, whether it’s the TSA or the IRS or the Federal Reserve. We don’t need it and they’re damaging to us and opportunities will come. The Soviet System collapsed without a war. Magnificent. I was in the military in the 1960s at the height of the Cold War and believe me, it was during the Cuban crisis I was called in. And those were rather different times and they were dangerous. But guess what, we didn’t have to fight them. They collapsed because of a ridiculous economic system. And ours is not a heck of a lot better right now. We’re less authoritarian, but we’re becoming more authoritarian. We’re ignoring the rule of law, but economically it’s foolhardy. And if we ever accept this idea that war can stop the recession and help us along, we’re in big trouble. One principle, though, that we really must challenge if you want to see difference in foreign policy, is the attitude that it is now permissible to have preventive war. Preventive war is aggression. America is not about aggression.

Today people are starting to get worried about China. Bernanke today and yesterday complained and they want to blame China for everything. Because the Chinese currency is too weak and they want to make it stronger. So they want to blame China but they won’t look upon ourselves. But guess what? China happens to be a country where they work, they produce products, they save their money, they invest their money, they buy up oil wells and mineral rights around the world, they loan us money. It sounds like they’ve caught the capitalist bug, and we’re having this dependency on them, so I don’t think this is going to work, in due time this will have to change. I think it will come about, I think we will have the crisis, it doesn’t have to be violent. We preach change, but not with violence. I think civil disobedience is great to practice. But ultimately it’s only the attitude that counts; study and understand Austrian economics, what civil liberty is all about. But most of all, we have to convince the masses of people, they have to be convinced that they’re best interests are served by believing in freedom. Up until now, people believed that my best interest is served by the dependency on government, they will always be able to rob somebody and give me some money. So they capitulate and they say, “If we get some food stamps, we’ll endorse this system of government printing favors”. But guess what? The food stamps dribble out to the poor and the big food stamps go to Wall Street and the bankers to the tune of trillions of dollars in secrecy.

But a free society allows us to pursue our goals of virtue and excellence. That is what makes a civilization; its individuals who want to pursue excellence and virtue in a private sort of way. When governments claim they know what is virtuous and only the government can tell us and spell it out, believe me, they are not virtuous. They want power and authority and they want to dominate and they want to dictate and they want us to be servants and respond to everything that they want. They want us to work hard so they can raise our taxes. The spirit is alive and well, it’s better now than it has been for a long time. 3 years ago, I could not get very many people to think about the Federal Reserve. Today every once in a while people will get together and they’ll start saying, “End the Fed”

So in addition to ending the Fed and the IRS and all the rest, restore our liberties and if we restore our liberties, all will be well. That should be our goal, we have an opportunity, lets pursue it.

Thank you very much.

Barry Goldwater Jr.: Well, wasn’t that great. Everything we hear Ron Paul, we learn something else. It’s wonderful on the ASU campus of education that we had the opportunity to listen to such a renowned leader of the freedom movement and liberty. Now Ron Paul’s going to be here, he’s doing a little interview in the back, but if want to shake his hand, get a book, get it signed, then line up over here in front of those tents. I know Ron would love to have …

67 Comments:

I think Dr. Paul's cellphone analogy toward the end of the video shows a little misunderstanding about the cellphone industry on his part. I don't think he realizes that the majority of cellphones are subsidized by plans that the consumer has to lock himself into by contract. But I understand what he was trying to say. I think "consumer electronic devices" would have been a more apt analogy. The technology sector is one of the few industries left that has a lot of freedom and competition.

Love the Federal Reserve! Inflation better than deflation! Love the modern era, as opposed to the gilded age! Obama 2012
And I love the govt, for helping to fund ARPANET, which led to the internet being developed and created!

Love the Federal Reserve! Inflation better than deflation! Love the modern era, as opposed to the gilded age! Obama 2012
And I love the govt, for helping to fund ARPANET, which led to the internet being developed and created!

Love the Federal Reserve! Inflation better than deflation! Love the modern era, as opposed to the gilded age! Obama 2012
And I love the govt, for helping to fund ARPANET, which led to the internet being developed and created!

Love the Federal Reserve! Inflation better than deflation! Love the modern era, as opposed to the gilded age! Obama 2012
And I love the govt, for helping to fund ARPANET, which led to the internet being developed and created!

This is probably the only subject I would disagree with Ron Paul on. I do not believe the politicians in Washington DC or the people behind them would leave or change without a bloody fight. If fact we are at the tipping point right now. My hero Thomas Jefferson once said "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." He wasn't wasting his breath when he said this but had actually lived through and faced the challenges we are faced with today.

This is part of the American-Space alien-Illuminati-Banker-Trilat­eral Commission-Obama's real birth certificate-Zionist-Communist-­Socialist-Fascist-Islamist-9/1­1 truth-secret cure for cancer the doctors are hiding-Area 51-White supremacist-Black supremacist-Asian supremacist-New world order-Templar knights-Hollywood elite-Kennedy assassination-We all came from Atlantis-Bilderberg conference-Masonic-UFO-Every disease on earth was created by the CIA conspiracy Internet morons unite!

He is right. In the end, people are stuck with the government they deserve. As long as the majority of Americans prefers to be brainwashed, as long as they prefer corrupt, greedy, aggresive leadership, as long as they couldn't care less about true liberty, peacefull and unsuperficial Christianity, personal responsibility, ignoring Jeffersonian values such as intellectual and moral independence and neglecting the radical instructions of H.D. Thoreau on how to live your life free from corrupt society and government, as long as the people are willing to give up the gold standard and economic freedom (and hence, freedom of conscience!!!!) to win green dollar bills that one day will be worth less than toilet paper... As long as Americans keep saying: ignorance is bliss, dark clouds await above their heads. People don't plan to fail, they fail to plan.
May the peace of the Lord be with Ron Paul that he may stand incorruptible before the corrupt kings and queens of Wall Street and the militairy industrial complex and that he may open the eyes of even the most stupified and indoctrinated citizens of that beautiful country that God has created with such beautiful rivers and mountains and nature. I sincerely hope America will wake up from slumber.

They're all puppets though. What I like about Ron Paul is that he even stated at a speech that he was not a puppet, and that he doesn't work for anyone. I guess it's because of the fact that the poor guy only has a few years left. But still, he'll never be too old. Paul is ridiculously popular than 2008, and he's already raised 9,000,000 unofficially. Our chances of winning are very slim, but we will make it to the final Obama vs. Paul. Just spread the word and hope.

They're all puppets though. What I like about Ron Paul is that he even stated at a speech that he was not a puppet, and that he doesn't work for anyone. I guess it's because of the fact that the poor guy only has a few years left. But still, he'll never be too old. Paul is ridiculously popular than 2008, and he's already raised 9,000,000 unofficially. Our chances of winning are very slim, but we will make it to the final Obama vs. Paul. Just spread the word and hope.

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